Live Mesh: It's Alive!

Because I use and recommend the ever-in-beta Live Mesh service from Microsoft, I get a lot of questions about it, and how I use it. But with Microsoft not updating its Live Mesh blog since last summer, fears have grown that Microsoft had given up on one of its best offerings. Fortunately, Mary Jo Foley, writes, that's not the case: And it looks like a major Live Mesh update is on the way.

One of the questions about Microsoft I get most often is whatever happened to Live Mesh ... I've tried asking quite a few Softies — even Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who made Live Mesh his pet project — to no avail.

LiveSide’s new information indicates that the current Live Sync (the product formerly known as FolderShare) is going to be replaced by Live Mesh, aka the new Windows Live Sync. (Yeah, naming complexity continues to plague the Windows Live team...) The old Live Sync could handle P2P sync only and didn't support Live Desktop/cloud storage, so it needed to go.

Here's how Live Mesh is going to work once it’s delivered as part of the Windows Live Wave 4 family, according to LiveSide:

"Windows Live Sync has gotten a complete revamp, pretty much dumping the old FolderShare interface and [becoming] a new ... piece of software in itself. As the client-side [front-end] for Windows Live Devices, Sync will allow you to [synchronize] files between devices and SkyDrive, as well as providing remote access to your PCs over the internet. Perhaps the most interesting piece of news is that Windows Live Sync will also support synchronization of your program settings ... allowing you to [synchronize] your Internet Explorer settings between two or more computers."

This is all very good news. A couple of points here.

Ray Ozzie's decision to let Microsoft pursue separate Live Mesh and Live Sync strategies, where each service had 80 percent overlapping functionality, was bad, because it was confusing for companies and stretched resources too thin. So combining them makes sense, however belated this is. (And of course there are other things, like SkyDrive and even MyPhone, that overlap in other ways as well. Let's get all this stuff centralized, please.)

Using Live Mesh (or whatever it will be called) to sync settings between computers is a great first step to a "settings in the cloud" feature where you set up a new computer, log into your Windows Live ID online, and then have all your custom settings blasted down the PC, negating the need to hand-configure new setups. This will be a boon to people like me, who set up new PCs all the time. But it should also be welcome news to all computer users, since this process is fraught with complexity and a time waster, no matter how infrequently you do it. It will also make the process of just starting over less painful, and thus more frequent for regular users too.

I'm excited about this, because I use and rely on Live Mesh, and was worried that the company was being far too quiet about its plans. MIX'10, which happens in about three weeks in Las Vegas, is obviously the ideal time for Microsoft to announce its plans for Windows Live Wave 4 and Live Mesh's future, so that's probably when the official reveal will occur.

Discuss this Article 60

Off-topic, but just putting it out there: Heavy Rain is an awesome game, and it's only on PS3. Take that, anyone that says that I'm one-sided pro-Microsoft!
Also, I preordered FF XIII. The story looks epic and the characters memorable and emotional, unlike most of the games since FF VII. Here's a look: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/international-trailer-final-fantasy/60730
Note to game creators: If you're going to choose a contemporary song as a "theme", interweave the melody throughout the game music to keep some kind of synnergy throughout all of the musical elements. That's what works for film. I don't mind using something like Leona Lewis (certainly better than the 80's-style J-pop stuff in the Japanese version, which just doesn't work in the Western world), but it would be better if they wrote most of the emotional cinematic music with the same melody to unify it, as it is in the trailer. There's a reason why they call it a "theme", after all.

My example? No it was from Ocean's Link. I was just helping him make his point...by reading the link. The point being that drop box does versioning. The example was of some programmer that gave a speech some place and went to get his presentation from mesh but it was gone, because his buddy dragged the presentation off of mesh onto his computer and it was gone from mesh.
None of these are enterprise tools as they stand today. Mesh might be an example of what can be done with Azure, but mesh is a pure beta aimed at enthusiasts.
The details you know about McDonalds is hilarious. Is your whitebox store front like one of those dual gas station/McDonalds only your store front is the gas station? Do you own both sides? Rotten Ronnie's is poison, in the US or Canada. I would not eat there unless I had too.

"My example? No it was from Ocean's Link. I was just helping him make his point..."
There's your classic backtracking again. Here's what really happened:
"rr0de74@live.com said:
@Wae.... www.hanselman.com/.../TechnicalPresentationsBePreparedForAbsoluteChaos.aspx"
Go ahead. Apologize: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN5TEP8FCUI
"Rotten Ronnie's is poison, in the US"
That's the only part of that sentence that's true.

I will go S L O W F O R Y O U. The schools you attended probably were not so great in Canada.
Ocean linked this article.....
http://www.ytechie.com/2009/02/convenient-synchronization-with-mesh-and-...
and in that article the author says this about mesh....
"s far as I can tell, Live Mesh doesn’t have plans to support a revision system like DropBox. I think this is a horrible, horrible mistake. Having a file on multiple machines provides nice redundancy, yet if you accidentally delete a file on one computer, Live Mesh will happily delete every copy of it. It even happened to Scott Hanselman"
The last sentence is a link to the article I posted talking about the actual "Scott Hanselman" experience.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TechnicalPresentationsBePreparedForAbsolut...
Take a moment, read it through slowly you will get it.
While you are at it, I will take a Big Mac, a desktop PC and since you do servers give me one of those with quad SLI, a killer NIC, 1000 watt PS, with a glass window on the side of the case...and oh dont forget the red neon light, plus some mustard.

"Ocean linked this article....and in that article the author says this about mesh...."
And you tried to back up his wrong argument with an example of what goes wrong when you use a beta application in a production environment, making you look like as much of a fool as him. Go ahead and backpedal all you want. We know what you said. Apologize to us all, but be sure you put some Chapstick on.
"since you do servers give me one of those with quad SLI"
Yup, that sums up your IT knowledge nicely. I pity any real (not imaginary) clients you may have.

I actually tried LiveMesh a few months ago, but it was a horrible pain setting it up and it was an ever bigger pain managing Live Mesh across various computers with different versions of the same document ending up across my computers.
I'll take Dropbox over LiveMesh and iDisk any day of the week. Its flexibility is unrivaled and so are its restore function and sharing capabilities.

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